presentation – Open Objects

Looking for (crowdsourcing) love in all the right places

One of the most important exercises in the crowdsourcing workshops I run is the 'speed dating' session. The idea is to spend some time looking at a bunch of crowdsourcing projects until you find a project you love. Finding a project you enjoy gives you a deeper insight into why other people participate in crowdsourcing, and will see you through the work required to get a crowdsourcing project going. I think making a personal connection like this helps reduce some of the cynicism I occasionally encounter about why people would volunteer their time to help cultural heritage collections. Trying lots of projects also gives you a much better sense of the types of barriers projects can accidentally put in the way of participation. It's also a good reminder that everyone is a nerd about something, and that there's a community of passion for every topic you can think of.

If you want to learn more about designing history or cultural heritage crowdsourcing projects, trying out lots of project is a great place to start. The more time you can spend on this the better – an hour is ideal – but trying just one or two projects is better than nothing. In a workshop I get people to note how a project made them feel – what they liked most and least about a project, and who they'd recommend it to. You can also note the input and output types to help build your mental database of relevant crowdsourcing projects.

The list of projects I suggest varies according to the background of workshop participants, and I'll often throw in suggestions tailored to specific interests, but here's a generic list to get you started.

10 Most Wanted http://10most.org.uk/	Research object histories
Ancient Lives http://ancientlives.org/	Humanities, language, text transcription
British Library Georeferencer http://www.bl.uk/maps/	Locating and georeferencing maps (warning: if it's running, only hard maps may be left!)
Children of the Lodz Ghetto http://online.ushmm.org/lodzchildren/	Citizen history, research
Describe Me http://describeme.museumvictoria.com.au/	Describe objects
DIY History http://diyhistory.lib.uiowa.edu/	Transcribe historical letters, recipes, diaries
Family History Transcription Project http://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibrarync/collections/	Document transcription (Flickr/Yahoo login required to comment)
Herbaria@home http://herbariaunited.org/atHome/ (for bonus points, compare it with Notes from Nature https://www.zooniverse.org/project/notes_from_nature)	Transcribing specimen sheets (or biographical research)
HistoryPin Year of the Bay 'Mysteries' https://www.historypin.org/attach/project/22-yearofthebay/mysteries/index/	Help find dates, locations, titles for historic photographs; overlay images on StreetView
iSpot http://www.ispotnature.org/	Help 'identify wildlife and share nature'
Letters of 1916 http://dh.tcd.ie/letters1916/	Transcribe letters and/or contribute letters
London Street Views 1840 http://crowd.museumoflondon.org.uk/lsv1840/	Help transcribe London business directories
Micropasts http://crowdsourced.micropasts.org/app/photomasking/newtask	Photo-masking to help produce 3D objects; also structured transcription
Museum Metadata Games: Dora http://museumgam.es/dora/	Tagging game with cultural heritage objects (my prototype from 2010)
NYPL Building Inspector http://buildinginspector.nypl.org/	A range of tasks, including checking building footprints, entering addresses
Operation War Diary http://operationwardiary.org/	Structured transcription of WWI unit diaries
Papers of the War Department http://wardepartmentpapers.org/	Document transcription
Planet Hunters http://planethunters.org/	Citizen science; review visualised data
Powerhouse Museum Collection Search http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/menu.php	Tagging objects
Reading Experience Database http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/	Text selection, transcription, description.
Smithsonian Digital Volunteers: Transcription Center https://transcription.si.edu/	Text transcription
Tiltfactor Metadata Games http://www.metadatagames.org/	Games with cultural heritage images
Transcribe Bentham http://www.transcribe-bentham.da.ulcc.ac.uk/	History; text transcription
Trove http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper?q=	Correct OCR errors, transcribe text, tag or describe documents
US National Archives http://www.amara.org/en/teams/national-archives/	Transcribing videos
What's the Score at the Bodleian http://www.whats-the-score.org/	Music and text transcription, description
What's on the menu http://menus.nypl.org/	Structured transcription of restaurant menus
What's on the menu? Geotagger http://menusgeo.herokuapp.com/	Geolocating historic restaurant menus
Wikisource – random item link http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Special:Random/Index	Transcribing texts
Worm Watch http://www.wormwatchlab.org	Citizen science; video
Your Paintings Tagger http://tagger.thepcf.org.uk/	Paintings; free-text or structured tagging

NB: crowdsourcing is a dynamic field, some sites may be temporarily out of content or have otherwise settled in transit. Some sites require registration, so you may need to find another site to explore while you're waiting for your registration email.

Designing for participatory projects: emergent best practice, getting discussion started

I was invited over to New Zealand (from Australia) recently to talk at Te Papa in Wellington and the Auckland Museum. After the talks I was asked if I could share some of my notes on design for participatory projects and for planning for the impact of participatory projects on museums. Each museum has a copy of my slides, but I thought I'd share the final points here rather than by email, and take the opportunity to share some possible workshop activities to help museums plan audience participation around its core goals.

Both talks started by problematising the definition of a 'museum website' – it doesn't work to think of your 'museum website' as purely stuff that lives under your domain name when it's now it's also the social media accounts under your brand, your games and mobile apps, and maybe also your objects and content on Google Art Project or even your content in a student’s Tumblr. The talks were written to respond to the particular context of each museum so they varied from there, but each ended up with these points. The sharp-eyed among you might notice that they're a continuation of ideas I first shared in my Europeana Tech keynote: Open for engagement: GLAM audiences and digital participation. The second set are particularly aimed at helping museums think about how to market participatory projects and sustain them over the longer term by making them more visible in the museum as a whole.

Best practice in participatory project design

Have an answer to 'Why would someone spend precious time on your project?'
Be inspired by things people love
Design for the audience you want
Make it a joy to participate
Don't add unnecessary friction, barriers (e.g. don't add sign-up forms if you don’t really need them, or try using lazy registration if you really must make users create accounts)
Show how much you value contributions (don't just tell people you value their work)
Validate procrastination – offer the opportunity to make a difference by providing meaningful work
Provide an easy start and scaffolded tasks (see e.g. Nina Simon's Self-Expression is Overrated: Better Constraints Make Better Participatory Experiences)
Let audiences help manage problems – let them know which behaviours are acceptable and empower them to keep the place tidy
Test with users; iterate; polish

Best practice within your museum

Fish where the fish are – find the spaces where people are already engaging with similar content and see how you can slot in, don't expect people to find their way to you unless you have something they can’t find anywhere else
Allow for community management resources – you’ll need some outreach to existing online and offline communities to encourage participation, some moderation and just a general sense that the site hasn’t been abandoned. If you can’t provide this for the life of the project, you might need to question why you’re doing it.
Decide where it's ok to lose control. Try letting go… you may find audiences you didn't expect, or people may make use of your content in ways you never imagined. Watch and learn and tweak in response – this is a good reason to design in iterations, and to go into public or invited-beta earlier rather than later.
Realistically assess fears, decide acceptable levels of risk. Usually fears can be turned into design requirements, they’re rarely show-stoppers.
Have a clear objective, ideally tied to your museum’s mission. Make sure the point of the project is also clear to your audience.
Put the audience needs first. You’re asking people to give up their time and life experience, so make sure the experience respects this. Think carefully before sacrificing engagement to gain efficiency.
Know how to measure success
Plan to make the online activity visible in the organisation and in the museum. Displaying online content in the museum is a great way to show how much you value it, as well as marketing the project to potential contributors. Working out how you can share the results with the rest of the organization helps everyone understand how much potential there is, and helps make online visitors ‘real’.
Have an exit strategy – staff leave, services fold or change their T&Cs

I'd love to know what you think – what have I missed? [Update: for some useful background on the organisational challenges many museums face when engaging with technology, check out Collections Access and the use of Digital Technology (pdf).]

More on designing museum projects for audience participation

I prepared this activity for one of the museums, but on the day the discussion after my talk went on so long that we didn't need to use a formal structure to get people talking. In the spirit of openness, I thought I'd share it. If you try it in your organisation, let me know how it goes!

The structure – exploratory idea generation followed by convergence and verification – was loosely based on the 'creativity workshops' developed by City University's Centre for Creativity (e.g. the RESCUE creativity workshops discussed in Use and Influence of Creative Ideas and Requirements for a Work-Integrated Learning System). It's designed to be a hackday-like creative activity for non-programmers.

In small groups…

Pick two strategic priorities or organisational goals…
In 5 minutes: generate as many ideas as possible
In 2 minutes: pick one idea to develop further

Ideas can include in-gallery and in-person activity; they must include at least two departments and some digital component.

Developing your idea…
Ideas can include in-gallery and in-person activity; they must include at least two departments

You have x minutes to develop your idea
You have 2 minutes each to report back. Include: which previous museum projects provide relevant lessons? How will you market it? How will it change the lives of its target audience? How will it change the museum?
How will you alleviate potential risks? How will you maximise potential benefits?
You have x minutes for general discussion. How can you build on the ideas you've heard?

For bonus points…

These discussion points were written for another museum, but they might be useful for other organisations thinking about audience participation and online collections:

What are the museum’s goals in engaging audiences with collections online?

What does success look like?

How will it change the museum?

Which past projects provide useful lessons?

How can the whole organisation be involved in supporting online conversations?

What are the barriers?

What small, sustainable steps can be taken?

Where are online contributions visible in the museum?

Notes on current issues in Digital Humanities

In July 2011, the Open University held a colloquium called ‘Digital technologies: help or hindrance for the humanities?’, in part to celebrate the launch of the Thematic Research Network for Digital Humanities at the OU. A full multi-author report about the colloquium (titled 'Colloquium: Digital Technologies: Help or Hindrance for the Humanities?') will be coming out in the 'Digital Futures Special Issue Arts and Humanities in HE' edition of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education soon, but a workshop was also held at the OU's Milton Keynes campus on Thursday to discuss some of the key ideas that came from the colloquium and to consider the agenda for the thematic research network. I was invited to present in the workshop, and I've shared my notes and some comments below (though of course the spoken version varied slightly).

To help focus the presentations, Professor John Wolffe (who was chairing) suggested we address the following points:

What, for you, were the two most important insights arising from last July’s colloquium?
What should be the two key priorities for the OU’s DH thematic research network over the next year, and why?

Notes on the colloquium and current issues in the Digital Humanities

Introduction – who I am as context for how I saw the colloquium
Before I started my PhD, I was a digital practitioner – a programmer, analyst, bearer of Zeitgeisty made-up modern job titles – situated in an online community of technologists loosely based in academia, broadcasting, libraries, archives, and particularly, in public history and museums. That's really only interesting in the context of this workshop because my digital community is constituted by the very things that challenge traditional academia – ad hoc collaboration, open data, publicly sharing and debating thoughts in progress.

For people who happily swim in this sea, it's hard to realise how new and scary it can be, but just yesterday I was reminded how challenging the idea of a public identity on social media is for some academics, let alone the thought of finding time to learn and understand yet another tool. As a humanist-turned-technologist-turned-humanist, I have sympathy for the perspective of both worlds.

The two most important insights arising from last July’s colloquium?
John Corrigan's introduction made it clear that the answer to the question 'what is digital humanities' is still very open, and has perhaps as many different answers as there are humanists. That's both exciting and challenging – it leaves room for the adaptation (and adoption) of DH by different humanities disciplines, but it also makes it difficult to develop a shared language for collaboration, for critiquing and peer reviewing DH projects and outputs… [I've also been wondering whether 'digital humanities' would eventually devolve into the practices of disciplines – digital history, etc – and how much digital humanities really works across different humanities disciplines in a meaningful way, but that's a question for another day.]

In my notes, it was the discussion around Chris Bissel's paper on 'Reality and authenticity', Google Earth and archaeology that also stood out – the questions about what's lost and gained in the digital context are important, but, as a technologist, I ask us to be wary of false dichotomies. There's a danger in conflating the materiality of a resource, the seductive aura of an original document, the difficulties in accessing it, in getting past the gatekeepers, with the quality of the time spent with it; with the intrinsic complexity of access, context, interpretation… The sometimes difficult physical journey to an archive, or the smell of old books is not the same as earned access to knowledge.

What should be the two key priorities for the OU’s DH thematic research network over the next year?
[I don't think I did a very good job answering this, perhaps because I still feel too new to know what's already going on and what could be added. Also, I'm apparently unable to limit myself to two.]
I tend to believe that the digital humanities will eventually become normalised as just part of how humanities work, but we need to be careful about how that actually happens.

The early adopters have blazed their trails and lit the way, but in their wake, they've left the non-early adopters – the ordinary humanist – blinking and wondering how to thrive in this new world. I have a sense that digital humanities is established enough, or at least the impact of digitisation projects has been broad enough, that the average humanist is expected to take on the methods of the digital humanist in their grant and research proposals and in their teaching – but has the ordinary humanist been equipped with the skills and training and the access to technologists and collaborators to thrive? Do we need to give everyone access to DH101?

We need to deal with the challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly publication models, peer review and the inescapable REF. We need to understand how to judge the processes as well as the products of research projects, and to find better ways to recognise new forms of publication, particularly as technology is also disrupting the publication models that early career researchers used to rely on to get started.

Much of the critique of digital working was about what it let people get away with, or how it risks misleading the innocent researcher. As with anything on a screen, there's an illusion of accuracy, completeness, neatness. We need shared practices to critique visualisations and discuss what's really available in database searches, the representativeness of digital repositories, the quality of transcriptions and metadata, the context in which data was created and knowledge produced… Translating the slipperiness of humanities data and research questions into a digital world is a juicy challenge but it's necessary if the potential of DH is to be exploited, whether by humanities scholars or the wider public who have new access to humanities content. 'natural order of things'.

Digitality is no excuse to let students (or other researchers) get away with sloppy practice. The ability to search across millions of records is important, but you should treat the documents you find as rigorously as you'd treat something uncovered deep in the archives. Slow, deep reading, considering the pages or documents adjacent to the one that interests you, the serendipitous find – these are all still important. But we also need to help scholars find ways to cope with the sheer volume of data now available and the probably unrealistic expectations of complete coverage of all potential sources this may create. So my other key priority is working out and teaching the scholarly practices we need to ensure we survive the transition from traditional to digital humanities.

In conclusion, the same issues – trust, authority, the context of knowledge production – are important for my digital and my humanities communities, but these concepts are expressed very differently in each. We need to work together to build bridges between the practices of traditional academia and those of the digital humanities.